Go, Helen, Go
by MorganHlaalu
Summary: Really suckass title. Rated for romantic and some sexual overtones. S/D An O'Grady woman muses on her brother-in-law's 17-year-old girlfriend, Helen Zass, and must wonder if she likes what she sees.


I watched, a little sadly, as Seamus came in with his girlfriend. Helen Zass. She was only 17, a rocker with a flair for the flamboyant. Everyone was betting on her being the next one to become an O'Grady. About time, everyone said, that poor Seamus settled down. Made some little O'Gradys. He was turning 26 next month, and all of his brothers and cousins, except for the youngest ones, who were Helen's age (to find anyone much younger than 18 you had to go down a generation, the oldest of which, Mae, was 14 and her father was already sniffing around some of her more distant cousins, looking for a match for her), had married and started families already. But Helen and Seamus were matched perfectly, from their musical tastes to their personalities. Seamus was very dominating, and from what I had observed of the couple, Seamus dominated Helen, publicly at least, and Helen was okay with that, as long as he wasn't hurting her (something she'd told me and several of the other O'Grady women she'd never stand for), and as long as he wasn't controlling her life. Well, if she stayed with him much longer, she'd have no choice but to allow him to control her. That went with the territory when you married into the O'Gradys.  
  
You see, I didn't marry into just any O'Grady family. I married into *the* O'Grady family. The Irish Mafia. My husband, Aeneas, has killed hundreds of people since I met him. Of course, Helen didn't know that. She knew, of course, that her boyfriend's last name was O'Grady, and she knew that he had a large, close family, and that he could trace down every single cousin or aunt or uncle or neice or nephew he had, no matter how distant, if they had the last name O'Grady. She knew a lot of the women who had married in looked and smiled at her with a look of sadness in their eyes, but she didn't know why. She didn't know that her boyfriend and probably future husband had killed 28 people in the last year alone, and uncountable hundreds in his lifetime.   
  
But time was moving quickly, and soon she and Seamus would have been together a year. It was tradition that on the first anniversary of a couple, the O'Grady revealed to their mate that they were Irish Mafia, and it was up to the person whether they stayed and married into the family, or walked away, never telling a soul. If they walked away and did tell, they would be tracked down and killed. That was simply the way it needed to work.   
  
I didn't know any O'Grady women who didn't regret their decision at least sometimes.  
  
I didn't want that fate for Helen. Because underneath her tough-as-nails, fuck-authority exterior, Helen was a genuinely good person. And she still had at least a little childhood left in her. She didn't deserve to have that taken away.  
  
But now, eight years later, we're not at that monthly formal dinner I thought those thoughts at. I'm sitting on the deck of the Merkin, an illegal tanker ship the O'Gradys posess and control, watching the dock intently, occasionally joining in the happy conversation about recieving the list of people in the witness protection program who squealed. I'm more jaded now, and I don't watch Helen with such sadness now, not because I'm sad she went through what she did, but because I know now that she will not give in to the charm of the O'Gradys, and she will defend herself, and she will not allow herself to suffer in the ways I did. I want that list as much as they do, because five years ago, three years after the Helen incident and Seamus going into an American prison, someone saw Aeneas kill a man, and my husband is now in the same prison as Seamus. I had asked someone, a little cautiously, if I was still an O'Grady, still welcome among the O'Gradys without Aeneas around, but one of the older, higher-up O'Gradys clapped me on the back and said "Of course you're welcome! You're family, Aaralyn," and he says it, they all say it, with a lilting Irish accent, so it always comes out sounding like Awralyn. "We never turn our backs on family." And I smiled, raised my glass elegantly to the man, and took a sip of the fine wine, thinking of my husand's tattoo along his shoulders saying "Only God can judge me," something many O'Gradys have, and wondered if I could ask for the money to get the same tattoo.   
  
I watch as Seamus walks through the wall off fire Helen and her friends have deftly created, and we all ooh and aah and wonder if Seamus will teach that to some of us. Helen has tripped and fallen, her friends have run away, and Seamus is advancing on her quickly. Helen is scrabbling backwards on the ground, eyes locked onto Seamus', and we all wonder how he can move that fast when he just fell thirty feet to the deck and walked through fire, but in the back of my mind, I can't help rooting for Helen.  
  
*Get up, Helen, come on, get up, don't let Seamus get to you. You're stronger than he is, you're stronger than any of them. Just get up. Get up and run. He won't follow, I know Seamus, he won't follow, he'll let you get away and settle for having you another, but you won't let that day come Helen, I know you won't, just get up.*  
  
It's all I can do not to cheer when Helen stands, turns her back on Seamus, and runs. A minute later, we hear a powerboat and see a small line of white waves as Helen and her friends run, run as fast as they can.  
  
*Go, Helen, go.* 


End file.
